Thursday, October 30, 2008

Welcome, and sharing some points

Welcome to Geek In The Pink, a blog dedicated to all of my I.T. musings worthy of publishing to the world ("worthy" may be an overstatement, but that's for you to decide, right?)

My intention is to cover any subject that directly or indirectly relates to the I.T. industry, particularly in Australia, but also the world. I work with a number of diverse technologies, both paid for and volunteering, so content will vary over time. There may also be a small amount of political opinion, however I intend to keep that to a minimum.

So, this first post is a short one, and really just some commentary instead of some real-life tangible information. Today I'm working with Microsoft SharePoint master pages, and themes. These are what you need to work with in order to change the look and feel of a SharePoint site. Basically, it boils down to:

SharePoint Themes are used to define CSS and supporting graphic files

SharePoint Master pages, like ASP.NET Master pages, are used to define a consistent HTML structure for your site

In reality, SharePoint is nothing more than an ASP.NET web application. If you come from an ASP.NET development background, Themes and Master pages are a concept you are probably familiar with. When you build an ASPX file, the directive can include attributes to define both of these.

When it comes to themes, the trick with SharePoint sites, however, is that the HTML has a whole lot of pre-defined CSS named elements, mostly via class attributes. Also, in typical Microsoft fashion, the HTML is not CSS friendly. Instead of separating the content from design, Microsoft have stuck with their table-based layouts, and multiple HTML entities identified by the same CSS names, in a way that makes sense if you're building the HTML and CSS together as one process, but does not make sense when you're attempting to re-skin an existing website.

The result is a cludgey, hacky CSS definition that is not easily readable or maintainable.

I'm going to wonder out-loud for a moment: Does Microsoft have any plans to fix this?

One of the key benefits I've noticed lately with the onset of "Web 2.0" style site development, is there's a clear push to implement a proper CSS - HTML / design - content separation. ASP.NET, and as a result, SharePoint, do not lead a developer down this path with the current out-of-the-box web controls.

One major block that is preventing SharePoint being accepted as a viable publishing mechanism for public-facing websites, is the intrinsic hooks to MSIE.

A cursory look over a typical page served up by SharePoint, and we have an example: <ie:menuitem> tags do not belong in the HTML of a public site. What's more, there are perfectly valid, standards compliant, backward compatible methods to acheive the results that those tags set out to accomplish. Microsoft need to conform, in order for their products to be taken seriously outside the internal, enterprise market.

By the way, as you may have noticed, this post is largely about SharePoint. To give you an idea of other near-future topics: Apple Dashboard widget development, PHP site development, volunteer web development work, and MS SQL Reporting Services.

1 comment:

Mental note to self: When editing master pages in the master page gallery, try to avoid checking in a version of the page that doesn't have all the required Placeholder elements. Doing so renders the master page useless, and any site using that master page ends up with the infamous "Unknown error" page.